The Museum Acquires a Notable Roman Sculpture of Venus

Praxiteles, an Athenian sculptor active in the mid-fourth century BCE, inadvertently caused a scandal across the Mediterranean when he created a life-size statue of the goddess Aphrodite for her temple on the island of Knidos, located in southwest Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). His innovation—depicting the goddess’s naked body—would dramatically change how Aphrodite was shown in the visual arts, with a prevailing emphasis on her nudity as emblematic of her divine persona as the goddess of erotic love.

Aphrodite is a prominent figure within surviving Greek myth, and in Archaic and early Classical Greek imagery, she is typically shown clothed in beautiful garments, often accompanied by birds, nymphs, or young women—companions that emphasize her association with marriage and female fertility. Praxiteles’s shift to portraying a nude Aphrodite at a vulnerable moment as she prepares to bathe was both striking and powerful.

Not long after Praxiteles’s Aphrodite was displayed, copies began to circulate. By the second century CE, when the Roman Empire had expanded to include the Greek world, such copies proliferated as artists creatively experimented with new compositions. One slightly smaller-than-life-size example of Venus—as Aphrodite was known in Rome—was recently acquired by the Museum. This object falls within the pudica, or modest, subgroup of variations, which depicts the goddess standing with one hand raised to conceal part of her breast while the other obscures her genitals. The Museum’s Venus Pudica clutches a piece of drapery with her left hand to further conceal herself.

She stands, as did the original Aphrodite of Knidos, in a relaxed pose that approximates a loose contrapposto. Her missing right arm would have bent at the elbow with the hand covering her left breast. Masterful carving and smoothing of the statue’s hard marble is apparent in every detail as the sculptor deftly captured the contours of the goddess’s collarbones, the soft fleshiness of her sensuously curving body, and the heavy fall of fabric that drapes around her legs.

Fragments of Venus’s hair display traces of yellow pigment, indicating that it was once painted. A small tassel, in life intended to add weight to a garment so that it would lie flat against the body, is visible at the tip of the cascading fabric between the goddess’s two sandaled feet, offering a surprising touch of realism to the otherwise ethereal representation of a divine being.  

The hand that grasps the drapery is slightly oversize, suggesting that the goddess was possibly intended to be seen from below. The back of the statue is unfinished, with tool marks visible across the back and buttocks. This lack of polish is surprising since images of Venus tend overall to demonstrate high levels of finish, particularly for those aspects of the female anatomy associated with sexuality and eroticism. However, if she were originally displayed in a niche, at some height above the ground, the back of the sculpture would not have been visible, and so the artist may have simply left it in a rougher state.

Supporting Venus’s weight is a strut that consists of a small, winged figure known as Cupid (or Eros in Greece), who rides on a dolphin. Struts were often necessary in Greek and Roman marble sculptures to offset and hold up the weight of the heavy stone. While the strut frequently took the shape of a tree trunk or rectangular block, here it has been elaborated into a figural scene that thematically relates to the goddess. Cupid is an unsurprising addition, since he is the personification of love and, according to some accounts, the child of Venus and Mars (Ares in Greece). His head tilts back as he looks up to Venus, implying that her head—now missing—likely turned to face downward, perhaps to meet his gaze. He holds out a small seashell, as if showing her what he found as they emerge from the water. He rides on a dolphin, whose tail wraps sinuously around Venus’s leg. The dolphin holds in its mouth a squid, whose tentacles fan out, blurring with the surrounding water. Traces of red pigment are visible on the dolphin, and there appear to be traces of possibly blue pigment on the water.

Representations of Venus gained particular significance under Rome’s first emperor, Augustus (r. 27 BCE–14 CE), who traced his lineage back through his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, to the Trojan hero Aeneas, the son of Aphrodite and Ankhises. The Cupid and dolphin composition seen in Venus’s strut became a shorthand reference to Augustus, in which Cupid symbolized the presence of Venus, underscoring the Julian family’s divine lineage, and the dolphin referred to Venus’s birth from the sea and to Augustus’s naval victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the decisive battle of Actium in 31 BCE.

This statue was likely made somewhat later, in the second century CE in Asia Minor, where it was probably also displayed, and was later collected by Louis de Clercq in the mid-nineteenth century. The region’s large cities—including Antioch-on-the-Orontes, Ephesos, Pergamon, and Aphrodisias—grew wealthy through the expansion of trade routes during the late Hellenistic and early Roman imperial periods and quickly became filled with monumental sculpture, lavishly decorated fountains, ornate villas, and opulent mosaics. Within this context, the Venus would have at once borne the visual ideology established by Augustus and been immediately comprehensible within the polytheistic religion practiced by the cities’ inhabitants, who originated from across the ancient Mediterranean. We might imagine the Venus Pudica on display within this cosmopolitan landscape, its crystalline marble glinting in the sun, the added paint lending a sense of immediacy to her image, and her downward gaze seeming almost to connect with the viewer’s own.

Carolyn M. Laferrière  
Associate Curator of Ancient Mediterranean Art